So far, many effective constituents of Chinese herbs or perfumes are secondary metabolites of plants. Secondary metabolites are organic compounds that are not directly involved in the normal growth, development or reproduction of organisms. These organic compounds, which have wide varieties and the chemical structures thereof are respectively different, could be classified to three types, phenolic compounds, isoprepenoid compounds, and nitro-organic compounds. The application of the secondary metabolites of plants is very wide, wherein they can be used in industries of medicine, chemical, food and agriculture and so on.
Taking the Chinese herbs for example, the obtainment of many Chinese herbs is not easy, because many wild Chinese herbs are threatened as a result of over-harvesting and habitat loss, or some Chinese herbs is not easy to culture due to the limitation of the growth condition. Therefore, the secondary metabolites of the Chinese herbs are valuable and scarce. Furthermore, the content of some target secondary metabolites in the nature plants is too low, for example, the content of the taxol in the bark of the pacific yew tree is only 0.02%, which causes the supply of the secondary metabolites to be far from satisfying the market requirements. Accordingly, how to effectively obtain the most amount target secondary metabolites from plants becomes an important subject.
People try to use chemical synthesis method to solve the problem about the limiting resource, but the method is not suitable for all kinds of the effective constituents from plants and the method has the problems of complicated process, high cost, stereoisomer forming during the process of the synthesis, and environmental contamination and so on.
Therefore, because of the defects in the prior arts, the inventors provide a method for increasing an amount of effective constituents from a plant in a solvent to effectively overcome the demerits existing in the prior arts.